Here are our questions. We’d like to know if you’re going to use us. Will our church be your opportunity to right all the Church’s wrongs, the ones you’ve been jotting down over your vast ten years of experience? (Sorry, I’m one of the ornery ones) Is our church going to be your opportunity to finally enact that one flaming vision you’ve been hell-bent on since seminary, that one strategic model that will finally get this Church-thing straight? Or might we hope that our church could be a place where you settle in with us and love alongside us and cry with us and curse against the darkness with us and remind us how much God’s crazy about us?

In other words, the question we want to know is very simple: “Do you actually intend to be our pastor?”

I’m trying to be as straight as I know: will you love us? And will you teach us to love one another? Will you remind us that we are to live well, not produce well? Are you willing to fail before you cave to the pressure to succeed? Will you give us God — and all the mystery and wonder, will you preach with a twinkle in your eye?

Last week New York City unveiled its public education campaign targeting teenage pregnancy. Taking a page from the Georgia obesity campaign and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the campaign features pictures of tear-stained toddlers admonishing their teen mothers for ruining their lives.

The ads are painful, and in a moment of sheer frustration and anger, I thought about ditching this article and just sending both Reeves and Mayor Bloomberg pictures of tear-stained pregnant teenagers staring out and declaring: “Please don’t attack my self-worth. I’m already struggling and desperate for love and belonging.”

Here’s the rub:

Shame diminishes our capacity for empathy.

Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.

The reason I was ill at ease about evangelicals making light of the papal process and then using Luther to defend it was this. Luther was taking aim at his own tradition. Not the tradition of his neighbor alone. Luther was not trying to start a new religion or denomination or sect. He was trying to reform the church already there. Luther was Roman Catholic, if you will. Not Lutheran.

Here is what I think, you wanna be like Luther? Set your aim on all the silliness with evangelicalism. The legalism. The celebrity. The concerts disguised as worship. The worship disguised as concerts. The marketing ad nauseum. The legalism. The calls for radical living from pastors with iPads and iPhones who live in the suburbs with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. Set your aim on the cover-up of sexual abuse. The legalism. Set your aim on a theology that questions everything and stands for nothing. The pastor as CEO. The pastor as rock star. The legalism.